Wilfrid Roberts

Wilfrid Hubert Wace Roberts (born August 28, 1900 in York , † May 26, 1991 ) was a British politician ( Liberal Party ; Labor Party ).

Life and activity

Roberts was a son of MP Charles Henry Roberts and his wife Cecilia, a daughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle . He attended Gresham's School in Holt , Norfolk and studied at Balliol College of Oxford University . He then became a farmer. He also became the owner of the Carlisle Journal newspaper .

Politically, Roberts joined the Liberal Party in the 1920s.

On the occasion of the British general election of October 1931, Roberts applied in the constituency of North Cumberland as a candidate of the Liberal Party for the first time for a seat in the House of Commons , the British Parliament, but was defeated by the conservative opponent Frederick Fergus Graham . In the parliamentary election of 1935 Roberts finally succeeded in being elected as a candidate in this constituency as a member of the House of Commons. After his mandate was confirmed in the parliamentary elections in summer 1945, he was a member for a total of fifteen years, until 1950. In the parliamentary election of 1950 - in which he ran in the constituency of Penrith and The Border - Roberts finally lost his seat in the House of Commons, as he was defeated in this election against the opponent of the Conservative Party . An attempt to return to the House of Commons at the general election of 1959, also failed: In this election he stood as a candidate for the Labor Party, which he joined in July 1956 in the constituency of Hexham, but the conservative mandate holders had to Rupert Speir beaten .

Roberts attracted attention in the second half of the 1930s when he became one of the most emphatic supporters of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in Britain's public life: he was secretary of the United Kingdom's National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, which he formed himself - as a member of the Spanish Committee of the British Parliament - had proposed. He also served as secretary of the Committee for the Assistance of Basque Children with John Macnamara . Due to the intensity of his commitment to the victims of the Spanish war, he was often mockingly referred to as "MP for Spain" ("Member of the British Parliament for the 'constituency' Spain").

Roberts also excelled in public as an anti-fascist: He advocated the idea of ​​forming an anti-fascist Popular Front, as it had temporarily existed in France, as well as the founding of the Left Book Club , which was a common forum for liberals, Socialists and communists by being actively involved.

In 1940 Roberts took over the post of assistant to the parliamentary manager of his parliamentary group Percy Harris . From August 1941 to March 1942 he then held the function of the parliamentary private secretary (PPS) of the liberal party leader Archibald Sinclair , who at that time held the post of Secretary of State for Air in the government of Winston Churchill . He later became chairman of his party's organizational committee. After the war, he headed the UK Parliament's Estimates Sub-committee.

During the Second World War Roberts belonged to a border regiment.

family

Roberts married Margaret Jennings († 1924) in 1923, with whom he had a daughter. In his second marriage, he married Anne Constance Jennings in 1928, with whom he also had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In his third marriage he freed Kate Sawyer.

literature

• Dod's Parliamentary Companion , 1967, p. 445.